Winfried Schulz 65 Jahre

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Comment on “Merger Policy in the United States”

This paper comments briefly on a merger policy article by Dennis Mueller. It concurs with Mueller's judgment that X-efficiency consequences are of crucial relevance in developing a sound antitrust policy toward mergers. It agrees also that firms proposing mergers overstepping structural guidelines should be permitted an efficiencies defense, but it stresses the difficulties of making ex ante efficiency predictions.     

Managing Institutional Complexity: A Longitudinal Study of Legitimacy Strategies at a Sportswear Brand Company

Multinational corporations are operating in complex business environments. They are confronted with contradictory institutional demands that often represent mutually incompatible expectations of various audiences. Managing these demands poses new organizational challenges for the corporation. Conducting an empirical case study at the sportswear manufacturer Puma, we explore how multinational corporations respond to institutional complexity and what legitimacy strategies they employ to maintain their license to operate. We draw on the literature on institutional theory, contingency theory, and organizational paradoxes. The results of our qualitative longitudinal study show that managing corporate legitimacy is a dynamic process in which corporations adapt organizational capacities, structures, and procedures.     

Organizing Corporate Social Responsibility in Small and Large Firms: Size Matters

Based on the findings of a qualitative empirical study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Swiss MNCs and SMEs, we suggest that smaller firms are not necessarily less advanced in organizing CSR than large firms. Results according to theoretically derived assessment frameworks illustrate the actual implementation status of CSR in organizational practices. We propose that small firms possess several organizational characteristics that are favorable for promoting the internal implementation of CSR-related practices in core business functions, but constrain external communication and reporting about CSR. In contrast, large firms possess several characteristics that are favorable for promoting external communication and reporting about CSR, but at the same time constrain internal implementation. We sketch a theoretical explanation of these differences in organizing CSR in MNCs and SMEs based on the relationship between firm size and relative organizational costs.     

Momentum and macroeconomic state variables

We find strong evidence that momentum across asset classes is driven by macroeconomic state variables. By reacting to changes in the macroeconomic environment, the strategy performs particularly well in times of economic distress. This result is interesting for practitioners and academics alike the success of an investment strategy that simultaneously looks at relative momentum across currencies, bonds, real estate, commodities, and equities can be interpreted as a payoff for rational investors hedging against predictable changes in the investment opportunity set. Our results allow us to establish a link between momentum and more sophisticated predictive regressions.     

A note on the valuation of asset management firms

Market capitalization relative to assets under management is often used to value asset management firms. Huberman’s (2004) dividend discount model implies that cross-sectional variations in this metric are explained by cross-sectional differences in operating margins, and yet we find no evidence of this in our data set. We show that a superior model—inspired by the work of Berk and Green (2004)—includes also the level of fees as an explanatory variable. This approach dramatically increases the fit of our valuation model and casts doubt on the relevance of the so-called Huberman puzzle.